


Anything for a Life

by suchadearie



Series: Trading for Touch [6]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2018-01-01 16:49:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1046218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suchadearie/pseuds/suchadearie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>End of the Trading for Touch series (EDIT: Apart from the Epilogue I was forced to write to make it happy again)</p></blockquote>





	Anything for a Life

The mayor was tapping her nails on the counter with palpable impatience when Gold stepped into the salesroom, and she narrowed her eyes to slits at his appearance. He had smoothed his clothes as carefully as possible, but still, there had to be a little disorder about him.

“You look…ruffled”, Mrs. Mills said, and he shrugged.

“I was moving furniture around. How can I help you?”

She was opening her mouth to answer, but just in this moment, the sound of another closing door – the backdoor – reached them, and she clapped her mouth shut. “What was that?” she asked, after a moment of silence, and he shrugged again.

“Probably the wind.” His eyes found Lily, hurrying past his shop-window, and something must have shown on his face, because the mayor turned around and looked out onto the street.

“Isn’t that…”

“Miss French. She was picking up a clock I repaired.”

“Right.” Mrs. Mills turned back and watched him with a look that was so full of distrust that Gold wondered if there was a scarlet letter on his forehead. “Isn’t that the florist’s daughter…Isabel or something?”

“Lily”, he supplied, and she smirked.

“Right”, she said again, with something like glee edging her voice.

“So, how can I help you?”

“I’m looking for something…”

In the end, the mayor left without making a purchase, and Gold returned into the backroom, sinking down on the cot and pulling the coverlet to his chest, burying his face in the scratchy fabric. He hoped to still find a trace of her scent left, something that remained, because everything about their encounters was so fleeting and fragile. He still didn’t trust her, and the feeling of having lost something still lingered in every touch and every look they shared, but maybe they could get over the pain they had inflicted upon each other. He didn’t know why he wanted to, apart from the feeling that she somehow provided an answer to a question he didn’t know, but he chose to ignore the why and what-for and just concentrate on the moment.

Lily didn’t come back the next day, and he didn’t see her again until he made his rounds and went to the flower shop to collect the rent. Usually her father handed over the money, but this time, it was her.

“My father is delivering flowers”, she said, with a quiet voice, and he wondered why she seemed so toned down. Not at all her usual sparkling self.

“Is everything alright?”, he asked, and she met his eyes with a sad smile. It seemed that she only ever smiled sad since he had punished her for humiliating him, and his stomach clenched with the sudden guilt. Their last frantic encounter, their clinging to each other, their kissing and giving in to their need had changed nothing. It couldn’t make them forget.

“Yes. Of course.”

“You didn’t come back. Did I…hurt you?” It almost killed him to ask, but he had to know.

“No. But I did it again, taking you, I mean, and I think it was wrong.” She looked down at her hands, her palms pressed flat to the working table where she was binding flower bouquets, and he realized that this time, she was the one that needed to be held. She looked so lost, so lonely, that he wondered what he had done to this girl, how he had been able to be so cruel. He feared she would break apart if he touched her, so he kept his distance, although every fiber in his body screamed to him to encompass her in an embrace and gently rock her back and forth until she felt better.

“We needed each other. There was nothing wrong with that.” He sounded strangled, and the heavy scent of flowers in the shop nearly suffocated him.

“I still need you”, she whispered, and he would have thought that he had imagined it, were it not for her hopeless eyes. She looked at him as if she was about to cry. He couldn’t stand it, so he stepped closer at last and pulled her into his arms, pressing her face to his chest just to escape that haunting look.

“But why, pet? I’m only an old man. Why would you need me? I have nothing to give.”

A tremor ran over her, and her shoulders trembled in his grip, and at first he thought she was sobbing. But then she pulled back, and he realized that she was laughing hysterically. Maybe she was insane after all.

“You don’t even know what you have to give. There is so much inside you that you don’t see…”

“And you see it?” It was almost a snarl, and she flinched, pulling back even further. He didn’t let go of her.

“Yes, I do. But no matter how hard I try, or what I do, I can’t make you see…and I’m slowly losing hope.”

“None of this makes any sense!” He was almost shaking her now, trying to make her rational with the sheer power of his will, but she just stared at him, her eyes clouding with something between panic and, strangely enough, grief. In a fit of madness, or fury, he hurled her back to his chest and crushed her lips in a brutal kiss, and he didn’t care that she went limp in his arms, didn’t care that she arched her back in an attempt to pull back. There was something contagious in her insanity, and he wanted to force it out of her, or maybe he wanted to take it all on himself, he wasn’t really sure. Only when black stars started to gnaw at the edges of his vision, and he realized that he had stopped breathing, he tore away from her, and he noticed horrified that he had bruised her lips with his savage kiss. He let go of her with a start, and she swayed, and grabbed the table to keep herself from falling.

“I’m sorry”, he whispered, and almost touched her again, gentle this time, to somehow erase what he had just done. But just before his fingertips reached the naked skin of her arm, he stilled, hesitated, and she stepped back, away from his touch and away from him.

“Don’t apologize. It’s ok.” She sounded as broken as he felt, and her words kindled his anger again.

“No, it’s not ok. Don’t say that. I have no right to treat you like this, and you shouldn’t forgive that.”

Somehow, his words seemed to evoke her own anger, and she stepped closer again, radiating a strange power that made him take a step back.

“Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t forgive. I decide what is ok with me, and what not. Why did you kiss me like that?” She took another step towards him, and he retreated further, nearly knocking over a vase with blood red roses.

“Lily…”

She stopped as if he’d punched her, and looked so tense that he feared the slightest touch would make her snap. “Why did you kiss me like that?” she repeated, and her voice sounded like a knife scraping over paper, choked and broken.

“Because I need you, and I have no idea why.” The confession burnt in his throat and on his teeth, felt like chewing icicles, and it was his turn to flinch this time, when she closed the distance between them and pulled him down into another kiss, gentler this time, forgiving, but no less insane.

“Come”, she whispered, taking his hand and pulling him with her, into the back and up a stairs, into a tiny room that had to be her bedroom, with nothing more than a bed and a wardrobe, and she pushed him down onto the bed and pulled her dress over her head and straddled his lap, kissing him again and again, as if she hoped her kisses would turn him into something else, maybe into the prince she deserved. He remained the same old man he’d always been, even when she started to rip open his clothes and showered his naked skin with kisses, even when she scraped her teeth over him and bit and sucked in his flesh, when she scratched him and dug her nails into his muscles, and when she mounted him, took him, and rode him into the ground. He remained the same, and each time she took him in, deep into her warm and wet flesh, he felt a little more incomplete, because he couldn’t provide what she so desperately needed. He had never detested his old flesh more than when he came undone, spilling himself deep inside her, without giving her what she wanted. She collapsed on his chest, sobbing and punching his arms that held her, again and again.

“Lily! Pet, please, it’s alright…” He tried to comfort her, caressing the back of her head, her hair, rubbing down her back in soothing circles, and after a while, her sobbing ebbed away. “I’m sorry”, he said then, kissing her wet temple, and she sniffed, and hiccupped.

“Me too.”

“You don’t need to be. You needed me, and I…tried to be there.” Somehow that made her sob again, and he murmured nonsense into her ear and kissed her again and again. He didn’t know what she was hoping to find, but he was almost sure that she wouldn’t find it with him. After a while, she lifted her weight from him, and dressed again, and he did the same, feeling more empty than ever. Her lips were still swollen, and he suppressed the urge to apologize again. Maybe he didn’t need her forgiveness, but his own.

“I really wish I could help you”, he said, when she had brought him downstairs again, and again she smiled that sad smile.

“I know. It’s ok. Maybe I just need to find another way…” She raised to tiptoes and pressed one last kiss to his lips, soft, tender, and he felt her forgiveness in that kiss. And when she pulled away, he felt the knot between his ribs dissolve, felt his anger and hurt slip away, and realized that he, too, had forgiven her.

“I’ll see you tomorrow”, he said, and this time, her smile was not quite so sad.

“Yes. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She stepped back, and it was in the nick of time, because seconds later, her father entered the shop, glancing anxiously at them.

“Mr. Gold. Everything alright with the rent?”

“Yes, yes. I was just leaving.” Gold nodded at French, and at Lily, and he heard how her father asked for the bouquets she had been preparing, and asked her to join him on his last tour for the day. Gold had to finish his rounds, too, and he thought nothing of the sirens when he left Granny’s. He thought nothing of the ambulances that rushed past him, and thought nothing of the sheriff’s car following them. His thoughts were with Lily, and circling around that strange warmth that settled inside him with the realization of having – and being – forgiven. Nothing prepared him for the shock the next morning, when his world came crashing down.

It was Mrs. Mills who strolled into his shop, the Storybrooke Mirror tucked under her arm, and wearing that blatantly false face of grief and sorrow.

“Mr. Gold, I’m stunned to see you so unmoved. Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?” he asked, and for the first time since the evening before, he remembered the ambulances.

“There was an accident. A deer crossed the road, and Mr. French did the wrong thing and tried to avoid it. He crashed his van into a tree.” She made a pause there, watching him with her sharp eyes as his world started spinning.

“And?” he asked, sharp as the blade of a scalpel, and the mayor shook her head in mock sorrow.

“Oh, he made it. But he missed to bring the van to the mechanic earlier this week, and the passenger seatbelt failed, and his daughter – Isabel?”

“Lily”, he said, barely breathing.

“Right. Lily. She crashed through the windshield. She died on the way to the hospital. Tragic, isn’t it?”

He didn’t hear another one of her acid words, and he didn’t realize that the mayor had left, until he found her paper lying on his counter, showing a picture of a van wrapped around a tree on the front page, right under the date, May 17, 1983. The full impact of that accident, however, hit him not until twenty eight years later, when he met the woman named Emma Swan, and found that missing piece of him, the piece that Lily French – Belle – had so desperately tried to show him.

 

***

 

_When she opened her eyes, all she saw was a grayish white. It was everywhere around her, beneath her, beside her, soft and sickening. Pain made her squint her eyes, and she tried to remember what had happened. Her throat was dry, so dry, dry as paper, and she tried to swallow to wet it, but her gums were dry as sand. She groaned, and tried to sit up, but her body was too heavy, and after a while, she just gave up. She looked at the soft rectangles of light on the padded walls, and she managed to turn her head a little to find out that the light fell through a barred window. She didn’t know where she was, and that window with its four bars was her only clue that she still was somewhere. She counted the bars twice, to make sure that it were four bars, and then she counted again to make sure that she still could count at all. When she had counted for the seventh time, and counted the shadows of the bars, too, on the padded wall, she was quite sure that she remembered how to count. Only when she counted the shadows of the bars for the fifth time, she was really sure that she indeed remembered how to count. What she didn’t remember was if she had a name. She didn’t remember if she ever had had a name._

_She was not even sure if she was someone at all._

**Author's Note:**

> End of the Trading for Touch series (EDIT: Apart from the Epilogue I was forced to write to make it happy again)


End file.
